From the moment we are cleverly introduced to his family through reminiscences about taking family portraits, it is clear that this is much more than a memoir. Apt literary references, coupled with an artist-poet-naturalist's descriptions of places and events, make this a unique book of prairie life in the 1940s.

Author (and painter) Victor Carl Friesen remains ever a “farmboy,” although he now, with his wife, Dorothy, lives in the town of Rosthern, Saskatchewan, but five miles from the quarter-section on which he was born. He holds MA and PhD degrees from the universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta respectively. Both his master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation focused on Henry David Thoreau, a foremost nature writer, and resulted in two books: The Spirit of the Huckleberry, a literary analysis of Thoreau’s work, and The Year Is a Circle, poems and photographs celebrating the American writer. Friesen has published nine other books and has won the Alberta Book of the Year Award and the Pfeiffer Award for academic research and writing. In addition, Friesen has authored some three hundred journal articles.

Victor Carl Friesen's profile page

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TREVOR HERRIOT is a grassland conservationist and naturalist who writes about human and natural history on the northern Great Plains. His last book, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds was a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and one of Quill & Quire's 15 Books That Mattered Most in 2009, and it was shortlisted for the Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing (Nonfiction).

His first book, River in a Dry Land: a Prairie Passage (2000), received several national awards and a nomination for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. His second book, Jacob’s Wound: a Search for the Spirit of Wildness (2004), was nominated for several awards, including a short-listing for the Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Trevor's writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail and Canadian Geographic, as well as in several anthologies. He has written two radio documentaries for CBC's Ideas and is a regular guest on CBC Radio Saskatchewan’s Blue Sky.

He and his wife, Karen, have four children and live in Regina.

Trevor Herriot's profile page